Who invented mind mapping?

Tony Buzan, the famous "father of memory" in Britain, invented the mind map. Mind mapping has attracted people's attention mainly because of a program broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which tells how a child with learning disabilities can make amazing achievements by using mind mapping. Once the program was broadcast, it attracted a lot of people's attention, and mind mapping became a topic that people talked about.

Mind map, English is MindMap, also known as mind map, is an effective graphic thinking tool to express divergent thinking. It is simple, effective and efficient, and it is a practical thinking tool.

1 founder

Tony Tony Buzan is internationally known as "Mr. Brain" because of his "mind map". He became the chairman of the British Brain Foundation and served as an international Olympic coach and athlete, as well as a consultant to the British Olympic rowing team and chess team. He was also elected as a member of the International Psychologists' Committee, the creator of the "spiritual and cultural concept" and the founder of the "World Memory Champions Association". He founded the Intellectual Olympics, which is dedicated to helping people with learning disabilities, and also has the title of the highest creative IQ in the world. Up to 1993, Tony Buzan has published 20 books, including 19 monographs and a collection of poems on thinking, creativity and learning. "Mind Map" has now become a familiar name. In fact, it has become a global phenomenon: the series of books on "Mind Map" have been translated into 35 languages and are popular in more than 200 countries; This series of books includes mind mapping, super memory, brain activation, fast reading and Bozan learning skills.

2. Application area

Mind mapping is an effective and efficient thinking mode. Applying it to the thinking map of memory, learning and thinking is beneficial to the divergent thinking of the human brain. Mind mapping has been widely used all over the world. Singapore's Ministry of Education has listed mind mapping as a compulsory course for primary schools, and a large number of Fortune 500 companies are also learning mind mapping. China has been using mind mapping for many years.

Since 1980s, mind mapping has been introduced into Chinese mainland. Initially, it was used to help "students with learning difficulties" overcome learning obstacles, and later it was mainly used by the industrial and commercial circles (especially in the field of enterprise training) to improve the learning efficiency and innovative thinking ability of individuals and organizations. In subject teaching, after 52 years of development, it is not widely used in schools. After 15 years of research and practice, the thinking visualization research team led by Liu Zhuoyuan of East China Normal University came to the conclusion that "mind mapping" is not suitable for direct application in subject teaching. For students with poor abstract thinking ability, "image memory" can really help students improve the efficiency of "memorizing knowledge", but it can't deepen students' understanding of knowledge, which belongs to a shallow learning; In addition, "free divergent association" has the characteristics of unconstrained style and uncontrolled thinking, which is more suitable for creative activities of "brainstorming" than subject knowledge teaching, because any subject knowledge has its inherent logic and fixed structure, so it is not allowed to entertain foolish ideas. Based on the characteristics of subject knowledge, subject teaching must emphasize "understanding memory" and "structured thinking". With the increase of study years, knowledge becomes more and more abstract and complex, so it is more important to emphasize "the depth of understanding" rather than "the speed of remembering". It is for these reasons that thinking visualization's research team grafted the advantages and characteristics of graphic methods such as concept map (proposed by Dr. Novak of Cornell University), knowledge tree and problem tree, and at the same time integrated the thinking modes such as structured thinking, logical thinking, dialectical thinking and questioning consciousness, and transformed "mind map" into "subject mind map". As a "knowledge construction strategy based on systematic thinking", "subject thinking map" has been introduced and applied by more than 500 experimental schools in China.

3. Application scenarios

Mind mapping can be applied to any field of study, life and work.